Symposium Speaker Bios — A Half Century of Fellowship

Layla Bermeo (Class of ’16) is the Kristin and Roger Servison Associate Curator of Paintings in the Art of the Americas department at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. She holds graduate degrees in art history from Williams College and Harvard University. At the MFA, Bermeo co-organized Collecting Stories: Native American Art (2018), curated Frida Kahlo and Arte Popular (2019), and mentored a team of youth curators who developed the new exhibition, Black Histories, Black Futures (2020).

Kirsten Buick is a professor of art history at the University of New Mexico. She received a PhD in art history from the University of Michigan and was a SAAM Predoctoral Fellow (Class of ’95) and a Charles Gaius Bolin Fellow at Williams College. Buick is a recipient of the David C. Driskell Prize for African American Art and has published extensively on the subject. She is author of Child of the Fire: Mary Edmonia Lewis and the Problem of Art History’s Black and Indian Subject (2010) and her second book, In Authenticity: “Kara Walker” and the Eidetics of Racism, is forthcoming.

Wanda M. Corn (Classes of ’79 and ’87) is the Robert and Ruth Halperin Professor in Art History Emerita at Stanford University and former department chair and director of the Stanford Humanities Center. Her many books and exhibitions include: The Color of Mood: American Tonalism 1890–1910 (1972); The Art of Andrew Wyeth (1973); Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (1983); The Great American Thing: Modern Art and American Identity, 1915–35 (1999); Women Building History: Public Art at the 1893 Columbian Exposition (2011); Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories (2011); and Georgia O’Keeffe: Living Modern (2017).

Charles C. Eldredge served from 1988 to 2018 as the Hall Distinguished Professor of American Art and Culture at the University of Kansas, where he is now professor emeritus. Previously he was director of the Smithsonian American Art Museum (1982–88), where he founded the American Art journal, and the Spencer Museum of Art (1971–82). A Smithsonian Postdoctoral Fellow in 1979, Eldredge has written extensively on American art of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Amelia Goerlitz is the chair of academic programs and acting co-chief of the Research and Scholars Center at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. She holds an MA in art history from the University of Texas at Austin, with an emphasis on Latin American art. She has contributed essays to American Art (2007; 2018; 2020) and Blanton Museum of Art: Latin American Collection (2006), and co-edited and wrote for East–West Interchanges in American Art: A Long and Tumultuous Relationship (2012).

Dimitrios Latsis (Class of ’14) is assistant professor of film studies at the School of Image Arts of Ryerson University in Toronto where he teaches in the film studies and the film and photography preservation and collection management programs. He received his PhD in film studies from the University of Iowa and has published widely in the fields of American visual culture and the historiography and theory of cinema and archival studies. A collection of essays Latsis co-edited on the rise of documentaries on the visual arts after WWII is forthcoming from Bloomsbury Academic.

E. Carmen Ramos is acting chief curator and curator of Latinx art at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Since joining the museum in 2010, she has dramatically expanded the museum’s pioneering collection of Latinx art with an eye toward challenging the exclusion of Latinx art from U.S. art history and capturing the broad aesthetic and regional range of the field. Ramos’s exhibitions at SAAM include Tamayo: The New York Years (2017), Down These Mean Streets: Community and Place in Urban Photography (2017), Our America: The Latino Presence in American Art(2013), and the forthcoming ¡Printing the Revolution! The Rise and Impact of Chicano Graphics, 1965 to Now (2020). Ramos holds an MA and a PhD from the University of Chicago.

Caroline Riley (Class of ’20) is the Judith and Burton Resnick Postdoctoral Fellow at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and a research associate at the University of California, Davis. Holding a PhD in art history from Boston University and an MA in American material culture from the University of Delaware/Winterthur Program, she has published on Pictorialism, nineteenth-century portraiture, vernacular art, and canonization. Riley’s forthcoming book, MoMA Goes to Paris in 1938, explores American art’s politicization. Her next book will examine photojournalist Thérèse Bonney and the twentieth-century information economy.

Sascha T. Scott (Class of ’07) is associate professor and director of graduate studies in the Department of Art and Music Histories at Syracuse University, where she is part of the core faculty for the Native American and Indigenous Studies Program. She is author of A Strange Mixture: The Art and Politics of Painting Pueblo Indians (2015) and has published essays in Art Bulletin, American Art, and Arts. Scott is currently at work on a book about early twentieth-century Pueblo painting and another about Georgia O’Keeffe.

Kirsten Swenson (Class of ’05) is associate professor of art history at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell. She is the author of Irrational Judgments: Eva Hesse, Sol LeWitt, and 1960s New York (2015) and co-editor and author of Critical Landscapes: Art, Space, Politics (2015). Swenson is currently writing a book on urban parks designed by Nancy Holt, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Agnes Denes, and Robert Morris that engage spatial politics and environmental histories. The book, tentatively titled Public Works: Land Art and Urban Redevelopment, is supported by a Graham Foundation grant and an ACLS Burkhardt Fellowship. She also recently co-curated the traveling exhibition and educational initiative Local Ecologies.

Stephanie Stebich is the Margaret and Terry Stent Director at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Before joining SAAM in April 2017, she served as the executive director of the Tacoma Art Museum from 2005 to 2017, and previously as the assistant director at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts and the Cleveland Museum of Art. Stebich currently serves on the board of the American Alliance of Museums and served on the board of the Association of Art Museum Directors. She received an MA in art history from New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts, and is a graduate of the Getty Museum Leadership Institute in Los Angeles.

Michelle Joan Wilkinson (Class of ’03) is a curator at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, where she is expanding the museum’s collections in architecture and design. Prior to joining NMAAHC, Wilkinson worked at the Reginald F. Lewis Museum of Maryland African American History and Culture and at the Studio Museum in Harlem. From 2019 to 2020, Wilkinson was in residence as a Loeb Fellow at Harvard Graduate School of Design. She received a PhD from Emory University.

Tatsiana Zhurauliova (Class of ’12) is the recipient of the 2018 to 2020 Terra Foundation for American Art Postdoctoral Research and Teaching Fellowship at the Fondation de l’Université Paris Nanterre and holds the position of an associate researcher at HAR, UPL, Université Paris Nanterre and LARCA, CNRS, Université de Paris. Zhurauliova received a PhD in art history from Yale University and her publications include an essay in New Narratives of Russian and East European Art: Between Traditions and Revolutions (2019).